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Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

THE TROUBLE WITH WHITE WOMEN

Kyla Schuller

A Counterhistory of Feminism

An incisive history of self-serving white feminists and the inspiring women who've continually defied them.
Women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Sheryl Sandberg are commonly celebrated as leaders of feminism. Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, white women, across political classes, have used racism and other hierarchies of power to win their own rights and expand their personal opportunities. Their white feminist politics have come at a great cost, resulting in the sustained exploitation, oppression, and silencing of women of color.

But resistance to these white feminist politics has continually emerged from Black, indigenous, poor, queer, and trans women and their movements for liberation. In The Trouble with White Women, Schuller brings to life the two-hundred-year counter history of these women pushing back against white feminists and uniting to dismantle systemic injustice. These feminist heroes such as Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauli Murray have created an anti-racist feminism for all. But we don't speak their names and we don't know their legacies. Unaware of these intersectional leaders, feminists have been led down the same dead-end alleys generation after generation, often working within the structures of racism, capitalism, homophobia, and transphobia rather than against them.

Building a more just feminist politics for today requires a reawakening, a return to the movement's genuine vanguards and visionaries. Their compelling stories, campaigns, and conflicts reveal the true potential of feminist liberation. The Trouble with White Women gives feminists today the tools to fight for the flourishing of all.

Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Director of the Women's Global Health Leadership Certificate Program at Rutgers University--New Brunswick. She is the author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke UP, 2018), and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Post Road. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Published 2021-10-05 by Bold Type Books

Comments

"The most adept historian is one who can transform carefully mined nuggets of archival material into compelling, if not piquant, prose. Schuller is a gifted storyteller, her counterhistory equal parts writerly craft and scholarly diligence.The Trouble With White Women is a welcome addition to the feminist canon. Undertaking the kind of critical labor necessary for engendering a truly liberatory feminism, Kyla Schuller is doing the work."

"Schuller's highly recommended feminist counter-history is inspiring, and her arguments persuasive. She excels in letting the voices and lived experiences of women of color, trans women, and otherwise marginalized women come to the fore." Read more...

"It's a hopeful and refreshing read that invites us to dream bigger and imagination more for feminism." Read more...

"Building a more just feminist politics for today requires a reawakening, a return to the movement's genuine vanguards and visionaries. Their compelling stories, campaigns, and conflicts reveal the true potential of feminist liberation. The Trouble with White Women gives feminists today the tools to fight for the flourishing of all." Read more...

"The brilliance of Schuller's work is that she reveals that white feminism isn't simply a politics, rather it is a mandate of a biopolitics.Schuller offers a refreshing contrast to a particular strand of 21st-century." Read more...

Japan: Akashi Shoten

"The Trouble with White Women is a truly necessary book, especially in the context of conservatives' redoubled war on history."

"This is a timely and essential piece that should find a wide audience in both public and academic libraries."